Her Parents Sold Her to a Feared Mountain Man — Then He Returned With a Promise No One Expected

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PART 3

“Saw you in Granger Creek four months ago,” Silas said. “In June. You were outside the dry goods store with your father. I recognized you from when I was fifteen.” He looked at the floor. “Callaway started making inquiries about the Mercer property in August. I heard about it in Billings — talk travels in small towns. I heard what he was planning.” He stopped. “So I came back.”

“You spent your gold. Everything you had. Enough of it for me.”

“Yes.”

She stood in the cabin they were apparently going to share for the winter, looking at this large, scarred, quiet man who had carved a sparrow at fifteen and remembered a drowning girl for twenty years and ridden down out of the wilderness to stand between her and the worst thing waiting for her.

“I’ll take the bed,” she said finally, steadier than she felt. “You can have the floor near the stove.”

“That’s fair.”

She still had the other sparrow, she told him — she’d carried it eight years. He didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. Outside, the wind picked up through the pines, beginning the long, slow work of burying the trail behind them. They were sealed in now, the two of them, and eight years of something neither had a name for yet.

The first week was the strangest of her life. She woke to real coffee and the sound of Silas already awake, already working. He never asked how she’d slept, never made conversation for its own sake, but the silence he carried wasn’t hostile — it was the silence of a man who’d been alone so long that talking required a reason. On the eighth morning, she decided she was done being managed.

“I want to know what needs doing,” she said, while he pulled on his coat.

“I handle what needs doing.”

“I didn’t ask you to handle it. I asked you to tell me so I can help.” She put her coffee down. “I’m not built to sit in this cabin for six months and watch you work.”

Something in his expression adjusted. “Can you shoot?”

“My father had a shotgun. I can fire it.”

“That’s not the same as shooting.”

“No. So teach me.”